The present invention relates to displaying video content, such as, for example internet video content, on a television in a communications network.
It is known in the prior art to display video content on a computer that is attached to the Internet as shown in FIG. 1. A user of a client computer 100 having an associated web browser 110 can request the display of a web page 120 from a server computer 130 by providing the URL (universal resource locator) for the web page 120. When the client computer 100 receives the web page 120, the web page 120 is rendered in a web browser 110. The displayed webpage 120 is a document that contains content in a format, such as HTML, along with links to other content, such as video content 150. The user of the client computer can request the display of the video content 150 by selecting the link. This selection requests the transmission of the video content from the server computer 130 through the Internet 140. The video content may be in any one of a number of different formats. For example, the content may be in Apple® Computer's Quicktime format, MPEG-2 format, or Microsoft's® Window's Media format. After the user has requested the video content 150, the video content 150 is transmitted to the client's computer 100 from the address associated with the link. Given that the video is in a particular format and is generally compressed, the video 150 must be decoded by the client computer 100. The video content 150 is decoded by a program separate from the web browser which may be a plug-in 160 to the web browser 110. The plug-in 160 is run and decodes the video content 150 and displays the video content 150 within the client's web browser. In other systems, the web browser accesses a separate program that displays the content.
In communication networks wherein the requesting device does not have the capability to separately decode video content from the web page content, the previously described client plug-in architecture will not work. An example of such a system is an interactive cable television system 200 that supports web browsing on televisions 210. The web content 230 is rendered at a remote location, such as a cable head end 240 as shown in FIG. 2. Such a cable television system 200 allows a subscriber to make a request for content using a communication device, such as a set top box 250. The request is sent to the cable headend 240 from a subscriber's set top box 250 and the head end 240 accesses the web page 230 from a server 260, renders the web page 270, encodes the web page 270 in a format that the set top box 250 can decode, and then transmits the webpage 230 to the set top box. If the web page 230 contains a link to video content 220 and the subscriber requests the display of the video content 220, the video content must be encoded in the format that the set top box can decode, such as MPEG-2 content. As such, the head end retrieves the video content associated with the requested link. The head end decodes the video content using an applicable program 280 and then re-encodes the video content 270 along with the web page in the format that the set top box can decode. Thus, each frame of video along with the substantially static webpage background is encoded. Such a process is time consuming, and resource intensive, particularly for streaming video. Additionally, because the video content needs to be decoded and re-encoded, information is lost, and therefore the displayed video has less resolution than the originally encoded video content.